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MARKED TREE -- St. Norbert Church has always been a mission of a larger parish. It has never had many members, and its resources have always been limited. So when the original church, built in 1949, had to be torn down in 1981, Randy Shinabery feared it would not be replaced.
"'There's just no way we'll ever build this church,'" he remembered telling his mother Marie. And she in turn advised her son to have a little faith. "'If you build it, the Lord will help you pay for it,'" he was told.
Seems his mother was right. In 1982 a new church was dedicated by Bishop Andrew J. McDonald. The multi-purpose building cost $120,000 and includes a chapel, kitchenette, bathrooms and a cry room. Two accordion walls can be lowered to separate the space for fellowship, meetings or religious education programs, said Shinabery, a lifelong parishioner and parish council president. He and his wife, Becky, live next door to the church and are the primary caretakers.
On Dec. 15 they met with Arkansas Catholic at Shinny's Nyal Drug Store to talk about their beloved parish. Shinabery, a pharmacist, followed in his father's footsteps and took over the family business in 1992.
To this day he still can't believe his mom was right. "It amazed me that people were willing to come forward," he said.
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His mother was there when the parish began. Her parents emigrated from Italy. When she was a teenager she moved to Marked Tree to help her sister and brother-in-law run their downtown grocery store. That is where she met her future husband, E.L. "Shinny" Shinabery. He worked for John and Frank Brunner, who had opened John and Frank Drugstore in Marked Tree back in 1915. These two men played a key role in getting the first St. Norbert Church built.
Shinabery said when the brothers opened their business in the small Poinsett County town, which is 30 miles southeast of Jonesboro and 40 miles northwest of Memphis, there was no Catholic community.
Little is known about how the parish began, but like most, it started with Masses being celebrated in family homes in the area.
Shinabery said Masses were held in the Brunner homes and at Walter and Mary Stignani's home. It is unclear how regularly this occurred.
The Brunner brothers married women who attended other Christian churches in the area. Their children practiced the religion of their mothers. At the time, none of the Catholic residents in and around Marked Tree could afford to build a church, Shinabery explained.
The Brunner brothers were successful businessmen and eventually were able to provide most of the money needed to build the first St. Norbert Church in 1949.
It was a two-story brick building with a chapel and two classrooms on the first floor and living quarters with three bedrooms, kitchen, living and dining rooms on the second floor, he said.
Three Benedictine sisters from Holy Angels Convent moved in upstairs and opened a school for about 20 children in 1957. Shinabery, 57, attended first, second and third grades there. The school offered grades 1-8. The pastor from St. Anthony Church in Weiner drove to St. Norbert every morning to celebrate Mass for the sisters and the schoolchildren, Shinabery said.
Catholics from Trumann and Lepanto attended in addition to those from Marked Tree, which currently has a population of 3,100.
"When I was in school, we started the day with Mass," he said. "I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for the priest to be here."
The school closed three years later in 1960.
"They just couldn't justify keeping it open for as few of students as they had," he said.
The sisters left and the parish began to rent out the upstairs to families in need from time to time. In the late 1960s, the Marked Tree public school system grew beyond its space and rented St. Norbert's classrooms for a few years, Shinabery said.
Also during this time, the parish bought the house next door to the church on Nor mandy Street, thinking it would be used by a resident priest, but a priest never lived in the home. So the church rented the home to local families.
With the sisters gone and no resident priest, the parishioners took charge. Shina bery said his dad, "Shinny," a convert to Catholicism, opened the church each week for the pastor. He fixed what needed to be repaired. This meant everything from changing a light bulb to replacing a window after the neighborhood boys accidentally broke it playing baseball.
"My dad always said he was the head custodian and chief assistant," Shinabery said.
In high school, Shinabery met his future wife, Becky. She attended the Methodist church. They married in 1970 and for the first year and a half of their marriage, they lived in the upstairs of the church.
They moved to Memphis while he earned his pharmacy degree and returned to Marked Tree in 1974. They rented the home next door to the church and have been there ever since. In 1980 they bought it from the parish. They raised three children and the family attended St. Norbert. Becky became Catholic in 1977.
St. Norbert was condemned and torn down in 1981. Structurally it wasn't safe because it had suffered one too many earthquakes.
"The church is sitting on the New Madrid fault," Becky Shinabery said. "It cracked a lot."
According to the Arkansas Geological Survey, the New Madrid seismic zone extends from Cairo, Ill., to Marked Tree. Since the original church was built, Poinsett County suffered numerous tremors. On March 24, 1976, four were recorded, the largest of these measured M5 on the Richter magnitude scale.
The new church was built with "a very expensive foundation to help with the cracks," she said. "We have not had any problems with it."
Randy Shinabery said the sons of the Brunner brothers, even though they aren't Catholic, both gave money to help pay for the current church.
"They knew how devoted their dads were to the Catholic faith," he said. "I've had John Jr. and Frank Jr. both tell me that they know that their (dads) would have been proud to be able to see my family raised at St. Norbert's. I thank them for me having that opportunity."
Through the years, he said church membership has gone up and down, but it was never a large parish. There have been potlucks and picnics, youth events, Bible studies and parish religious education programs.
Becky Shinabery, parish bookkeeper, said there are now 41 parishioners at St. Norbert.
The PRE program, which takes place on Wednesday nights, has about nine kids ages 8 to 16. Four children made their first Communion at the parish in May 2008.
Mass is celebrated on Sundays at 11 a.m. and attendance "depends on if it's hunting season," she said with a laugh.
"We've always accepted that we're a mission," Randy Shinabery said. "We've never had anything else to expect."
He said not long ago a former pastor was concerned with the lack of parish life and wanted to do more. Shinabery told him that having Mass each week is all he asks and "whatever bonuses you could give us for Ash Wednesday or whatever, that's great!"
Father Paul Worm is pastor of St. Norbert. He also serves Immaculate Heart of Mary in Walnut Ridge and St. Anthony in Weiner. He lives in Walnut Ridge and said he drives a 140-mile loop each weekend to celebrate Mass at these churches.
One of the first things he said he noticed about St. Norbert "was the young people were doing everything. They were taking up the collection, they were doing the readings."
Father Worm said people like the Shinaberys are crucial to a small parish's survival.
"Since I'm only in on Sunday to say Mass, I'm depending on the Shinaberys to watch it the rest of the week," he said. "I don't worry about Marked Tree."
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